The Third Place
Words for ACV Magazine
How many friends do you have? How often do you see them? Where do you hang out?
Do you hang out?
There's plenty to be said about the socio-spatial network; and how urban planning integrates the existing heritage and tradi-tions of a community into a physical space, providing a stabilising influence for the neighbourhood and its denizens – but we’re not going to examine the concept in that much detail. Instead we’ll be casting a beady (and extremely casual) eye at the cultural devaluation within that framework that’s part of what’s led to the diminishment of community spaces in tandem with an acute in-crease of social isolation and poor mental health; as we continue to outsource our social needs to inferior virtual surrogates, like social media.
The “third place” is a term coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg and refers to a place that isn’t home (the “first” place) or work/ school (the “second” place). The function of a third place is a socially critical one; the third place is where we go to just be with others. It provides community building structures (metaphorically and literally) and both catalyses and is a place of traditions.
They are locations where we exchange ideas, have a good time, build relationships and mix with people who are both like and unlike us. Spaces that can be considered third places are church-es, cafes, public libraries, gyms, bookshops, stoops and parks; and although malls are traditionally dubious third places, they can still be counted as such.
Oldenburg’s main criteria for the third place are:
Neutral Ground – you have no obligation to be there!
Leveller – your socioeconomic status does not matter.
Conversation – the main activity.
Accessibility – “third places must be open and readily accessible to those who occupy them.”
Regulars – people who regularly frequent the space, familiar faces etc.
Low Profile – an absence of pretentiousness and a focus on ac-cepting all kinds of individuals.
A HOME AWAY FROM HOME – "Occupants of third plac-es will often have the same feelings of warmth, possession, and belonging as they would in their own homes. They feel a piece of themselves is rooted in the space, and gain spiritual regeneration by spending time there.”
Third places have lived in the popular imagination for a long time too. Consider how many sitcoms throughout the 80s, 90s and early 00’s organised their casts around a single “third place” location like a coffee shop or diner. You can likely easily visualise a bunch of old dudes playing cards or dominoes at a cafe, shop, bar or salon they’ve been visiting for decades, because you’ve seen that image somewhere before.
We know social media both prevents and injects loneliness into our lives.
Some argue it’s all about how you use it. My argument is that it’s all about how everyone is using it. Sure, online commu-nities can offer very real benefits and a sense of inclusion, safety, familiarity and cultivates ritualism in itself – however this is a de-parture from a more traditional means of connection, one that is in real life and one that gifts us with the physiological rewards of having spent meaningful (or meaningless, if that’s your view) time with other human beings. Breathing the same air. Synchronising our brain waves. Seeing and being seen. Good human stuff. The UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) published the first es-timates of loneliness at a local authority level reporting high rates of loneliness and poorer well-being: “Levels of loneliness in Great Britain have increased since spring 2020. Between 3 April and 3 May 2020, 5.0% of people (about 2.6 million adults) said that they felt lonely “often” or “always”. From October 2020 to February 2021, results from the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN) show that proportion increased to 7.2% of the adult population (about 3.7 million adults).” Connection is vital to your good health and a whole lot of us aren’t getting the right stuff. The third place is disappearing and our opportunities for ser-endipitous encounters, brushing up against strangers soberly, purposefully, are slipping away too. Where else can one look to trigger the hypertrophy of their social muscles these days? It’s not happening online. What occurs online is illusory at worst and half-baked at best. Real-time feedback, flesh and blood and terri-ble breath and maybe a cute smile are what we need to rep out to get that human connection strengthened.
A prioritisation of balance between our digital and irl worlds I think is something that would serve us best. Right now, it can seem like we’re looking at our worlds through a little window pane. You can get a sense of too much rehearsal, not enough improv. A phone call is chilling (you might have to respond to someone in real time with your real, unvarnished opinions that might be wrong or worse, you may not speak with absolute moral certitude and seem STUPID or what if you just don’t know how to words anymore???), yet 5,000 pages of texts are fine.
When I think about my 20s, what strikes me most is how little I did but how much it felt like something. It’s because I had a bunch of third places. One of which was a McDonald’s car park, one was the cafe down the street, one was our local garden pub and of course, there was the mall. Each of these places were home to traditions of the classic HANG OUT. I’d call a friend who’d call a friend who’d call a friend and we’d say, “wanna hang out?” and we’d go to one of these places and accomplish very little together, it was brilliant.
People obviously still do this, but it seems there are more barriers than before. The sweet treats of streaming services and being able to put in friendship-maintenance-work by lazily flapping your Dorito-encrusted thumb against your phone screen while staring at Netflix is a lot harder to pull away from. You just don’t have to work as hard to socialise, you could say – but therein lies the problem: the socialising itself. It is stripped of ritual, of tradition, of even meaning because the context is too wide, too incoherent, too haphazard. I can have a multiple hour text session with some friends but to me, it’s a stretch to call it socialising. These people don’t live far from me, so why don’t we y’know… hang out?
Yes yes, the pandemic has cast a sinister, strange pall over the world. Socialising has become a circumspect activity. Things have changed and the social biosphere that’s changed most rapidly is probably the one within which we work.
With a lot of us working from home, the “second” place has fused into the first, a combination some view as unholy and others as relieving. I'm somewhere in the middle. I don't particularly like working from home because it’s isolating, but I also hate being forced to corral myself into a building with people I'd rather not spend time with.
The third place seems the obvious antidote to this, but we’re giving up more and more of our literal and emotional real estate to developers who think a place like WeWork is a great place to “hang out” and less resources are being funnelled into communi-tyforward projects, businesses and city planning.
Any place that’s built with the aesthetic of a traditional third place (a cafe, some desks, shelves of books) but functions only to insid-iously extract productivity or money from its visitors is not a third place. It is an anxiety-inducing shithole. It is the antithesis of the third place.
Likewise with the bars and cafes whose garish xennial stylings include impossibly high stools, ugly, pokey, uninviting, grey fur-niture providing all the spiritual comforts of being in a dentist’s chair; and no ambient light sources that aren’t a row of naked light bulbs, industriously scorching your retinas as you drink something insipid and overpriced. Everything in these places is designed to get you in and kick you out. There is no comfort, only a vague sense of conspiracy that you need to buy another coffee or leave immediately.
Third places are designed to be temporarily lived in. They’re supposed to be inviting and comfortable. If ever you’ve developed an affection for your local pub, remember that “pub” is short for “public house”, it’s your place too.
Whether it’s you and some friends at an inexpensive cafe hangout, or a pub, or a park or a library meeting every week or fortnightly or on whatever recurring interval to do something or nothing together, that’s your ritual and that’s your tradition made possible by your physical environment.
It’s not just friends you’ll be gathering with in the third place, it’s strangers too. People you don’t know can just as easily thread themselves into the designs of your lived tradition, by becoming regulars (or by you becoming a regular) – locations that encour-age loitering are more the vibe when it comes to the third place tradition – accessibility and a disintegration of the socio-econom-ic stratum mean an increase in the probability of a truly random encounter.